TO enhance the students’ skills and capabilities on cyber security, Yuchengco-owned Mapua University recently formed a partnership with global cyber-security provider Sophos that will also help students into a smooth transition from college to work force.
“We are excited to partner with Sophos to align and develop our curriculum in preparing our students for the working world. As a country, we’re taking cyber security seriously, and it is important to us that our students are equipped with the right knowledge and skills to become valuable employees for businesses looking to protect against the evolving threat landscape,” Mapua University’s School of Information Technology Dean Ariel Kelly D. Balan said in a press statement.
For a start, Balan revealed Sophos will provide train the trainer-style education on XG Firewall for Mapua faculty members. Once they have attained Sophos certification, Balan pointed out Mapua professors will be equipped with the skill set to impart their new cyber-security expertise to students through a structured university curriculum. Students will be able to take on Sophos exams to obtain cyber-security industry certification.
Sophos will also provide hardware devices and virtual machines for Mapua’s student laboratories.
Sumit Bansal, managing director for Sophos Asean, stressed the introduction of cyber security to the engineering curriculum in Philippine universities is perfect timing as the cyber-security threat is becoming more sophisticated.
“As a result, there is greater demand in the Philippines for cyber-security professionals to keep the country safe from cyber threats as it continues its digital transformation journey.
Through our partnership with Mapua, we hope to provide greater access to the right learning tools and experts in this field, so students can further optimize their employment opportunities upon graduation,” he said in a press statement.
This partnership with Mapua University complements Sophos’s investment into developing IT professionals in the Philippines as it continues to grow its team of application developers and quality assurance specialists.
Founded in 1925 by Don Tomas Mapua, an architecture graduate of Cornell University in the United States and the first registered architect of the Philippines, Mapua University is the Philippines’s premier engineering and technological university.
Mapua is a top Asian university, entering the prestigious Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Asia University Rankings for 2019. It is a QS-rated university, obtaining a three-star overall rating for excellence, and a five-star rating in the categories of employability, facilities and social responsibility. It has also been recognized by Times Higher Education for its social and economic impact, placing in the Partnership for the Goals category of the inaugural THE University Impact Rankings.
Oxford, England-based Sophos is used by more than 400,000 organizations of all sizes in more than 150 countries for their cyber-security requirements Moreover, it secures through SophosLabs endpoints (laptops, servers and mobile devices) and networks against evolving cyber criminal techniques, including ransomware, malware, exploits, data exfiltration, automated and active-adversary breaches, phishing and more.